Editorial: Class of 2014, start with your obituary

Dear graduate, after you hang up your cap and gown but before you make your way in the world, write your obituary.

Writing your obituary clarifies everything. How else to know which path to take if you donít know where you want to arrive?

Fill your obituary with all of your hopes and dreams, some of which you likely wonít realize you have until you take the time to sit with yourself and reflect. Know the greatest rewards are often earned only after great losses. Few people who achieve greatness over the course of their lives were born to it.

Take the great writer Maya Angelou, who died this month. She was born a black woman in 1928 when it wasnít safe to be either black or a woman.

She was raised by her grandparents in Arkansas after her family fell apart and her motherís boyfriend raped her when she was just 8. She chronicled those terrible days and more to come in her first memoir, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." But as she wrote in one of her most memorable poems, "Still I Rise" she was undaunted: "You may tread me in the very dirt, But still, like dust, I'll rise." She did.

Over the course of her 86 years, Angelou was a single mother, a dancer, an actress, an administrative assistant, a streetcar conductor and a college professor, but when people think of her, they donít consider what she did in life but what she did with it. She gave more to the world than she was ever given. That is her legacy.

Or consider Matt Bruce, who never would have guessed, back when he graduated from Algonquin Regional High School in 2005, how soon his obituary would appear. He died in March, less than a year after he was diagnosed with ALS, a fatal disease.

But Matt didnít fill his last months feeling sorry for himself. He traveled the world, meeting people, making friends and talking to anyone who would listen about the need to fund research and find a cure for MLS.

"He showed us how to live. Let us all learn a lesson from Matt, and live each day like itís our last," his mother, Natalie Bruce, said after receiving an award recognizing her sonís efforts.

Writing your obituary when youíre so young and with years before you isnít meant to be an exercise in the morose but a lesson in how to create a life well-lived on your terms. Your life is your own, to be determined by you. Only you can choose if the walls before you will crush you or become the foundations on which you build a future.